John le Carre Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Cat, Stories

• Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

  John le Carre

  Movie, Book, Reading

• A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Cat, Watches

• There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Mountain, Impossible

• Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

  John le Carre

  Mistake, Book, Writing

• I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Hands, Literature

• It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

  John le Carre

  Lonely, Writing, Thinking

• Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Work Out, Imagination

  "John le Carré at the NFT". Interview with Adrian Wootton, www.theguardian.com. October 5, 2002.

• Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Dust, Pie

• Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Thinking, Hands

• Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

  John le Carre

  Baby, Book, Home

• Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

  John le Carre

  Real, Writing, Artist

• I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

  John le Carre

  Strong, Book, Writing

• I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Spy, Desperate

  "John le Carré: 'I was a secret even to myself'". www.theguardian.com. April 12, 2013.

• When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Two, Twenties

• It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Principles, Stories

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